White Guilt Undermining Legacy of Black Buffalo Soldiers

In 1866, the Inited States Congress established the first all-black peacetime regiment in the regular U.S. Army, a regiment that came to be known as “the Buffalo Soldiers.”

The regiment first assembled at Fort Leavenworth, and it continues to be memorialized there as well as at Fort Riley in Junction City.

Those who respect American history speak about the Buffalo Soldiers with pride. A nonprofit known as the “Buffalo Soldiers of the American West” describes the soldiers’ mission as “to protect settlers as they moved west and to support the westward expansion by building the infrastructure needed for new settlements to flourish.”

Black soldiers “served proudly” in the regiment and received $13.00 a month, “far more than they could have earned in civilian life.”

Predictably, the Buffalo Soldiers have been caught in the gears of the PC machinery. For years celebrated and honored, the Buffalo Soldiers are now up for reinterpretation.

The left prefers that minorities be seen as victims not heroes.

Luke X. Martin of KCUR, the region’s NPR station, sees it ironic “that a group of black men — not citizens at the time, and not able to vote — fought against another persecuted group at the behest of white interlopers.”

In his contribution to Black History Month, Martin manages to transform heroes into victims and envisions them as mere pawns of the “white interloper.” In one sentence, Martin reveals just about how little he knows about the history of the American west. The conflict between whites/blacks and Indians was hugely more complicated than the progressive elite is willing to admit.

The Comanches, for one, would have found the phrase “white interloper” mildly amusing.

Martin also conveniently ignores the fact that by 1868, two years after the Buffalo Soldiers first mustered, Republicans had elected a black man to congress. Many more black Republicans served in Congress after the 15th Amendment was passed in 1870, which bestowed full citizenship on African Americans. (We know, just the men, and we apologize in advance.)

Of course, Democrats stripped away those rights in one state after another. No black Democrat was elected to Congress until 1935. And Democrats continued to deny blacks full franchise in any number of states for 30 more years before interlopers from the north, black and white, deprived southern Democrats of their age old traditions.

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